June 18, 2012

Recently, a colleague asked me whether or not we could print the IMG logo in an unapproved color.

Colleague: "We are thinking of giving Tiffany playing cards to some of our guests. Tiffany's can customize the cards with a logo, but they can only print in gold."

Me: "Gold is not in our color palette. Can they do a different color?"

Colleague: "Unfortunately, no. The cards have a gold edge, so it's the only color they can print."

Me: "Would you be interested in producing the cards elsewhere?"

Colleague: "But then they wouldn't appear in a pretty blue box!!"

The unmistakable pretty blue box is exactly why I denied this request and why we keep our colors consistent. Over time, the repetition of color and form can create deep meaning in and of itself.

Indeed, the IMG visual identity is our attempt at the Tiffany's box: it's a simple, well crafted, classically designed container which houses some of the world's most valuable gems in sports, fashion and entertainment.

May 31, 2012

This London-Heathrow billboard is so poorly worded it feels intentional. Turkish Airlines basically created an advert for United Airlines. It's a waste of both their sponsorship with ManU and their media dollars.

Turkish and United are codeshare partners, and both are members of Star Alliance, but that should be of little consolation.

April 20, 2012

Since you'll never see this cinematic Indian Premier League (IPL) ad here in North America, I thought I'd share it. As an intro to the IPL itself, the league was developed by IMG in conjunction with the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) 5 years ago. Since then, it's become one of the world's top 5 most valuable leagues, and is almost certainly the most important new league since 1992, when the English Premier League was formed.

At IMG, we developed the brand brief for the IPL here in New York, chiefly researched and written by Aubrey Lovery in conjunction with internal clients at IMG and the BCCI team. As always, we used our proprietary ICON Engineering methodology to understand and position the IPL brand. The ad was created by O&M (Mumbai).

At the heart of the brief was the idea that the IPL plays a relatively new style of cricket known as Twenty20 or T20. T20 lasts about 3 hours--compare that to "Test Matches" which can last as long as 5 days.

This new style of match created an important constraint for our brief. The BCCI governs both the IPL (3 hour games) and Test Matches (4-5 day games) so we needed to differentiate the IPL in a specific way: cricket purists sometimes view a 3 hour T20 game as less serious--something that would be true for any sport if a similar situation occured.

Taking this into account, the IPL brand vision embraces the fun, Bollywood atmosphere created at games, while acknowledging that it attracts the world's best cricket players for its teams and that it brings cricket to an even wider audience in India, especialy on TV.

The translation of the IPL brand vision into the resulting ad is even better than we could have hoped. Congratulations, Ogilvy.

As someone who deals with people brands, I think this is a game changer for Mayor Booker. He already has a great CV and excellent visibility, but this is just so over the top. Could this be the start of a White House run, with a gubernatorial race in between?

I think this is particularly bad news for Gov. Chris Christie. It certainly creates matchup problems for him, because his weight, for better or worse, would now be an even greater focal point. Perhaps the result of this perception problem is that Christie decides not to run for re-election in 2013, saving it for 2016.

But what, then, if Booker also runs in 2016, either creating an improbable all-NJ presidential race, or pushing the GOP to nominate someone other than Christie because of weight issues? Or maybe Christie will suddenly clamor to be on the impotent Romney ticket.

Christie's certainly the biggest loser of the day, and obviously, not in the way he would have hoped.